Chicago-born 'Shadow' shines off-Broadway

March 22, 2005|By Chris Jones, Tribune arts critic.

NEW YORK — In his semifactual off-Broadway play about the theatrical clash of the titanic egos of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, playwright Austin Pendleton gets one tricky thing absolutely right -- he knows how to combine the cheapest kind of celebrity gossip with enough leavening thematic gravitas that his hands never seem too dirty.

In "Orson's Shadow," now playing at New York's Barrow Street Theatre, Pendleton dishes and dissects in roughly equal proportion -- moving seamlessly from Vivian Leigh and Larry Olivier's sexual peccadilloes to the changing nature of Anglo-American culture as the 1960s approached and wiped out the postwar dinosaurs.

This Chicago-originating show is like a Page Six of the New York Post translated especially for theater-history nerds. Audiences get the delicious dirt and the deeper cultural analysis. They're titillated and intellectually tickled at once. No wonder this savvy, smart affair is doing very, very nicely off-Broadway.

With equal measures affection and revulsion, Pendleton tells of the psychopathic and incestuous antics of Welles, Olivier, the critic Kenneth Tynan, the fragile Leigh and the self-consciously modern Joan Plowright. The conceit here is that all of these people's insecurities unravel after Tynan persuades Welles to direct Olivier in a production of "Rhinoceros" (that part is fiction; but the personalities are fact). Taken together, this crowd is like a bunch of grand, old-media conglomerates trying to fight off all the ignorant bloggers, even as they know they can do nothing to stop cheap democratization.

Remarkably, this whole commercially produced affair has turned out to be an impressive showcase for Chicago theater. Not only did "Orson's Shadow' first fall at the Steppenwolf Garage, but the entire cast of this New York production is made up of Chicago actors, under the direction of Chicago director David Cromer (the play's original director).

In most cases, these are journeyman Chicago performers such as John Judd, who plays Olivier, and Jeff Still, who plays Welles.

Still has paid an awful lot of dues in Chicago. And Judd has been plodding away in Chicago's low-budget theaters for more than 20 years. Thanks to this production, which has attracted stellar New York reviews, they could well be on the cusp of serious, late-blooming success.

There have been a couple of cast changes from the Steppenwolf original (in January 2000), but Chicagoans merely were replaced with other Chicagoans. Tracy Letts, who borrows some from his recent work as Norman in "The Dresser," now takes the role of Tynan, the play's main narrator. That change adds to the magisterial force of the part, even as it removes some of its prior gentleness and vulnerability afforded by David Warren. The role of Joan is now played by Susan Bennett, a veteran of the old Annoyance Theatre. Bennett also is a spunkier choice, even as she loses the authentically suave British style of her predecessor in the role, Sarah Wellington.

Overall, though, the show works better in New York than it did in Chicago. Since we're supposed to be in a scruffy theater, the Barrow Street's proscenium is far more suitable than the ground floor of a parking garage. And Cromer's tart direction takes advantage of these resonances by moving actors all over the theater, in various stages of the agony typified by Lee Roy Rogers' desperate Vivian.

Pendleton has tightened up the script, which now is much better focused on the core issues of the drama -- the paradoxical relationship in the theater between risk and complacency and between artistic purity and commercial expediency.

The play accepts the genius of Welles and Olivier as a given. It is interested in whether they grew or went stale, played cheap tricks or pushed themselves to their creative limits. Such are universal problems. As their struggles played out in Hollywood or London, of course, these people also had personal lives -- of a pathetic sort. Their successors' similar struggles for that elusive balance now make up today's gossip pages.